Lauren Olamina

One of her most beloved novels, The Parable of the Sower, follows this pattern.

It tells the story of Lauren Oya Olamina as she makes her way through a near future California ruined by corporate greed, inequality, and environmental destruction.

As she struggles with hyperempathy, or a condition in the novel that causes her to feel others' pain and less often their pleasure, Lauren embarks on a quest with a group of refugees to find a place to thrive.

There, they seek to live in accordance with Lauren's found religion,

So that's pretty much what the essay is about.

And I'm trying to tie it to like black feminists learnings and, Lauren Olamina from Parable of the Sower and how she navigated the apocalypse and all of that.

I just ordered that book.

So good.

This is a towering achievement in American literature.

The novel follows a young woman named Lauren Olamina, who is forced to walk north from a walled, gated community in a completely collapsing near future Los Angeles.

She walks through a landscape of rampant fire, desperate theft, privatization of water, and a society that has coldly decided that only some lives are worth salvaging.

The crazy thing is it's a 20th century novel that is actually the defining book of the 21st century.

Other than that, it's kind of hard for me to separate the two parables just because I kind of went right into writing the script for Parable of Talents pretty soon after we finished work on Parable of the Sower.

But I think Talents... was like a little more interesting storytelling opportunities because um it's not just one narrator uh it's not just lauren olomina but it's also her daughter asha and to a certain extent a couple other ones but mostly asha um and because she's written about in the novel as being a content creator for like a virtual reality space uh we decided to have her scenes where she's sort of talking to the reader become much more kind of fantastical than the more grounded reality of the scenes Lauren's narrating.

So that was kind of a cool opportunity to move out of the single perspective and sort of into a multiple perspective that let us do more kind of creative storytelling techniques than like the reality of, of, uh, Lauren Olamina's life would allow or make sense for.

Um, but then also, uh, so I, to be honest, had not finished reading talents when we first pitched doing the two books, but I was under the impression that it can't possibly get darker than parable of the sower, which was a foolish thing to think.

Um, so, you know, uh, With this book even more than Soar, I think the weight of its similarities to our actual reality in the United States currently, It was a heavier weight, I think, on the project even than when we were working on Soar in 2016, 2017.

Which we both loved dearly.

We both loved and will recall that the countless times that the protagonist and her community, Lauren Olamina, that is, had to reckon with this question of lethal force and survival and how that all intersects with their religious and moral framework.

And I thought that was very powerful in that novel.

You also got to see depictions of kind of human cruelty in a way that compelled you to just remember the value of morality.